I used to sit for hours
at an electric typewriter.
I remember well its hum.
I used to drink glasses of wine—
well, anyway,
I would drink one.
I used to sing in a chorus.
I remember my voice
entering the blend, the anonymous shallows
clean and barely rippling,
or sharing a duet with Krista,
a bent harmony, our first altos meeting
and crossing
like a pair of notched
sticks.
Our bit was from a poem of Lorca
set to music:
Ay amor, que se fue por el aire—
That was the line.
Bill, on the podium, was still alive.
The eighties, you brutal
darlings—
We married in you.
We even gave parties.
And the great Russian poet
spoke his fortieth-birthday
poem for us in a small room—
the one about munching
the warty bread of exile.
Which he was doing right then
at one of those institute luncheons
where the intellects reeled, the writers
gossiped and bloomed.
However, there was
a genuineness.
A hush and ripple of pain
as the Russian language
surged over us, clanging and bitter.
Not a song but a cry, Ay amor!
He sat in a folding chair
and declaimed, yearning into
our empty hearing.
Why remember
these things
and not others?
Well, later we had
a big black dog
with a noble, curly snout
who leapt
straight up
into the air—pure vertical
he was, the dog
of my children’s
childhood,
which is now
over and gone
like so much, so much.
